David Gates

Silence on the Great White WayWe hope that by the time you read this the whole mess has been straightened out. But as of last weekend, a musicians' strike had shut down most musicals on Broadway.

Providence doesn't grant me many of those moments of absolute certainty that the president seems to inhabit 24/7--as if Saul, struck blind on the road to Damascus, had just stayed blind.

Fighting The PowerIf antiwar folks were hoping for high drama at last week's Grammys, they must have gotten the wrong decade. True, Sheryl Crow wore that no war guitar strap, but not the T shirt the Recording Academy was dreading.

Last night I skipped the president's news conference in favor of a dinner at New York's Union Square Cafe. The meal progressed from Washington State oysters to Italian goat's-milk cheese and port from Portugal, drifting all the while up a lazy river of French wine (just so you know where I'm coming from).And at some point, I talked about a piece I had been planning to write today.

Most singers--from Louis Armstrong to Eminem--perform to us. They want our admiration for their skill, our sympathy for their imagined joys and sorrows, our assent to their attitudes, sometimes our shock and disapproval--but always our attention.

"The typical pattern with one of my books," maverick literary critic Leslie Fiedler told NEWSWEEK in 1984, "is that when it comes out everybody abuses it.

Maybe one reader in a thousand knew Sarah Pettit's name, but they knew her mind and sensibility, which would have pleased her just as much. (Well, more or less just as much.) From the spring of 1999 until her death last week, at 36--which is unacceptable--Sarah was the editor who directed NEWSWEEK's coverage of arts and entertainment.

If you can imagine such professional grown-ups as retired Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, ex-Clintonite James Carville and former NOW head Patricia Ireland dabbling with paints and pastels--then your name can only be...

CORRECTION APPENDED Of course there's nothing funny about drunken-driving charges, so it could have been Diana Ross's well-known sense of self-irony that made her fall down laughing, as Tucson, Ariz., police claim, when they made her try to stand on one foot last week.

An obsession with time--its amplitude and elasticity, its depredations, its inexorable passage--has driven all Nicholson Baker's work. His first novel, "The Mezzanine" (1988), opens up the squirreled-away wonders of an ordinary lunch hour.

Last week a couple of still-unidentified guys attacked pop-electronica whiz Moby as he signed autographs outside a Boston nightclub. "The only description of the perpetrators," says Boston police spokesperson Nadine Taylor-Miller, "was that they were two white males in their 20s." One punched him in the head and knocked his glasses off; the assailants used pepper spray on the doorman who came over to help, then fled.

In 1965, the year Frank Sinatra turned 50, Life magazine did a cover story on him, and photographer John Dominis followed him around. Life used only a few of his 4,000 images; now former Life editor Richard Stolley has resurrected a slew of them in a new book called "Sinatra: An Intimate Portrait of a Very Good Year." Sinatra was still in marvelous voice--it was the year he recorded (naturally) "It Was a Very Good Year." But this was by no measure (as the uncritical text claims)"the peak of the...

The wholesale bootlegging of Bob Dylan began decades ago with a plain-white-jacketed LP called "The Great White Wonder," a bad dub of some of the already lo-fi Basement Tapes.

Last week publicist Lizzie Grubman, who did damage control for such loose cannons as Sean (P. Diddy) Combs, began a 60-day stay in eastern Long Island's least desirable vacation spot, the Suffolk County Jail.

Seven decades after Plymouth Colony Pilgrims feasted with naively obliging natives, Massachusetts Bay Puritans began ratting out their neighbors and confessing to eating red bread with the Devil.

This fall the rolling stones have finally mounted exactly the tour you would've ordered up. Such neglected favorites as "She Smiled Sweetly," the 59-year-old Mick leaping like his own grandson, the 58-year-old Keith still standing.

At the very end of "Blue Latitudes," Tony Horwitz's memorable, meticulously reported account of traveling in the wake of Capt. William Cook, he says his own 5-year-old son wants to be "an adventurer" when he grows up.

When music addresses a catastrophe like the September 11 attacks, how can you tell heart-tugging kitsch from the real deal? John Adams's "On the Transmigration of Souls," which had its world premiere with the New York Philharmonic last week, gives a simple text--victims' names, words from "missing" posters and The New York Times's "Portraits of Grief"--to a complicated ensemble: orchestra, chorus, children's chorus, prerecorded sounds.

Because his quantifiable achievements, however staggering, are the most boring thing about Sandy Koufax, let's get them out of the way now.FOR SIX YEARS, 1961-66, Koufax was the most commanding pitcher in baseball--and those six years were enough for the editors of Sports Illustrated to name him their favorite athlete of the 20th century.

Jeffrey Eugenides must have waited years to exploit a certain sniffy and sinister passage from T. S. Eliot: "Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant/Unshaven, with a pocketful of currants...

Leni Riefenstahl, who turned 100 last week, is clearly exasperated that she's still asked about the brilliant and powerful documentary films she made for Hitler in the 1930s. "I don't know what I should apologize for," she told the Associated Press in a rare interview. "I cannot apologize, for example, for having made the film 'Triumph of the Will.' It won the top prize." She's always insisted she was an artist, not a Nazi, and that she wasn't to blame if her films were used as propaganda.

In some alternate universe, Marilyn Monroe, who did not die 40 years ago this week, remains a contemporary and relevant--if reclusive--figure. Saved by an "It's a Wonderful Life" intervention as she sat staring at the pill bottle (Bobby Kennedy was her Clarence), she went on Prozac and swore off men.

After such pieces of jingo cheerleading as Neil Young's "Let's Roll" and Paul McCartney's "Freedom," the idea of rock-and-rollers "responding" to September 11 seems like opportunistic kitsch.

On the one hand, Alan Greenspan said the merely obvious last week during that speech to Congress in which he claimed "an infectious greed" had contaminated American business. "It is not that humans have become any more greedy than in generations past," he said. "It is that the venues to express greed had grown so enormously." On the other hand you had tomarvel that the high priest of free-market capitalism, once a disciple of the radically unsentimental libertarian Ayn Rand, should be talking...

Ralph Stanley has been one of the great American singers for more than 50 years, first with his brother Carter, as half of the Stanley Brothers, then on his own after Carter's death in 1966.

For a while now, I've been finding current fiction hard to read: airlessly competent, relentlessly put-together, overthought. The literary equivalents of click tracks and tuners regularize the tempos of plots and smooth out the narrative voices.

At this point, wouldn't it be a lot more shocking if Eminem didn't try to shock people? Of course, we'll probably never know, especially since rap's reigning bad boy is poised to release yet another controversial video.

She called herself Lisa (Left Eye) Lopes because a man once told her that eye was especially beautiful; the glasses she wore onstage had a condom in place of the left lens.

About the only person surprised by Robert Blake's arrest last week for the murder of his wife, nearly a year ago, was the actor himself, who was in his underwear when the LAPD barged in.

At some point or other, just about anybody who plays guitar hankers after a Martin, the steel-string acoustic guitars made in Nazareth, Pa., since 1833. (My own hankerings started when I learned to play, back in high school, at a time remote enough to seem like 1833, when rebellious young punks formed bluegrass bands.)New Martins are the Cadillacs of the guitar world--some high-end luthiers are now making Porsches, Ferraris and Lamborghinis--and vintage Martins are the Rolls-Royces.